Struggling Geographies: Rethinking Livelihood and Locality in Timor-Leste

10. Struggling Geographies: Rethinking livelihood and locality in Timor-Leste Sandra Pannell A Geography which Struggles I: Introduction The island of Timor could be regarded—to borrow Edward Said’s expression— as a ‘geography which struggles’ (1993:6). Our understanding of this geography is dominated by a discourse of destruction and degradation. Writings about the island and its people commonly talk about the ‘Timor tragedy’ or the ‘Timor problem’. As James Dunn’s account reveals, the tragedy of Timor (see Dunn 1983:xi) is a story of gross injustice and local suffering, linked to the dismal failure of the international community to respond to Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1974. Since independence in 2002, it seems that ‘poverty and unemployment’ are contributing to a ‘new tragedy’ in one of the world’s latest nation-states (BBC n.d.). Timor’s ‘problem’, on the other hand, is said to be an island-wide ecological crisis, caused by swidden agricultural systems and population pressure.1 While the notion that local shifting cultivation systems in the ‘Outer Islands’ were inherently fragile and maladaptive to increasing population was first identified by F. J. Ormeling in 1956, it was Clifford Geertz’s study of ecological change in Indonesia that popularised the idea (Geertz 1963). While not intended as such, Geertz’s conclusions about swidden agriculture appeared to reinforce existing and overly negative European perceptions of these systems as primarily ‘attended by serious deforestation and soil erosion’ (Geertz 1963:15–16). The characterisation of local subsistence systems as ‘voracious slash-and-burn agricultural regime[s]’, with ‘low agrarian production’ (McWilliam 2002:1), responsible for Timor’s environmental ‘problem’, has prompted a significant national and international development effort aimed at changing local land-use practices and improving the country’s economic circumstances. Yet, as delegates attending Timor-Leste’s first conference on ‘Sustainable Development and the 1 As both Fox (1977) and Friedberg (1977) point out, however, colonial policies and actions in both East and West Timor played an important—often overlooked—role in the creation of this crisis, in symbolic and empirical terms. 217 Land and Life in Timor-Leste: Ethnographic essays Environment’, held in Dili in 2001, identified, ‘400 years of colonization by Portugal, and 25 years of occupation by Indonesia’ (Anderson and Deutsch 2001:11; see also McWilliam 2003:308) have also contributed to the process of ecological degradation and resulted in substantial changes to local subsistence practices. For example, Fox (2000:24) reports that during the latter part of the Portuguese colonial period, the Government initiated a series of agricultural extension programs in an attempt to ‘induce a shift of population’ to the least-populated southern coast of Timor. While the ecological and population density variability found across Timor-Leste was perhaps not an intended consequence of such social displacements, colonial resettlement schemes have, in part, contributed to the situation wherein the Lautem district in the far east of the country has one of the lowest population densities and some of the more extensive forested and coastal resources of all the regions in Timor- Leste. In the period of Indonesian occupation, as Soares (2001:20) points out, napalm bombing and forced resettlement practices by the military ‘saw a mass destruction of the environment’ and resulted in widespread famine. Dunn (1983:338) also comments upon the ‘rapacious exploitation’ of sandalwood and other forest-based resources, which the Timorese traditionally depended on for their livelihood, during this period. Speaking of livelihoods, both Soares and Fox report that traditional identities, constructed around particular modes of livelihood, have been severely eroded over the past 25 years as a result of population movements and a greater emphasis upon rice and commercial crops, such as coffee (Fox 2000:25; Soares 2001:19–20). Indeed, Shepard Forman (1981:87) goes so far as to conclude that for the Makassae of Timor-Leste, with the loss of their means of livelihood during the period of occupation, ‘the cycle of production and exchange which reproduces life has been broken’. While the Sustainable Development conference delegates emphasised the rampant ‘destruction’ (Anderson and Deutsch 2001:20) of the environment resulting from this history of colonisation and forced occupation, it is a history that also alerts us to the adaptive nature of Timorese subsistence practices. For many so-called ‘farming’ communities throughout Timor-Leste, critical to their survival throughout this turbulent history was a reliance upon a variety of resources gained from hunting-and-gathering activities in local forests and woodlands, waterways and inshore marine areas. The anthropological and economic literature on East Timorese societies is somewhat silent about these practices, often depicting shifting cultivation as the sole means of subsistence or as the predominant ‘life paradigm’ (Forman 1981:96). Certainly, in some areas of Timor-Leste today—for example, in central Ainaro and in heavily populated areas of Bobonaro, where deforestation and extensive cultivation have led to an almost complete reliance upon swidden or seasonal dryland agriculture, and the concomitant attenuation of non- 218 10 . Struggling Geographies: Rethinking livelihood and locality in Timor-Leste agricultural subsistence practices—this is increasingly the day-to-day reality (A. McWilliam, Personal communication). While historically local people in these areas might have pursued more diverse subsistence practices, population pressure and the expansion of the amount of land under intensive cultivation have effectively served to narrow local livelihood options. As Fox (1977:17) points out, however, in characterising Indonesian ecological systems as based upon wet rice cultivation or swidden agriculture, other ‘important ecological systems in the outer islands’ are neglected. Some idea of the existence of these other systems is apparent in the written record where, as the pages of history indicate, an agricultural-centric model of Timorese life has not always predominated. For example, on the voyage of the Dutch brig-of-war Dourga to Portuguese Timor in 1825, Kolff, the commander of the expedition, commented upon the ‘neglect’ of agriculture in the districts around Dili. Kolff writes that while the land was ‘highly fertile’, it appeared to him that the Portuguese were too ‘indolent’ to turn their attention to agriculture, while the ‘natives’ were too engaged in the local, highly profitable slave trade to bother with such pursuits (Kolff 1840:38). From Kolff’s account, it is clear that Portuguese Government officials derived a considerable portion of their income from the slave trade, and also from the commerce in beeswax and sandalwood, which local people were ‘forced to deliver up at a small, and almost minimal price’ (p. 35).2 On his visit to East Timor in 1861, Alfred Russell Wallace also reports upon this latter commerce, stating that ‘almost the only exports of Timor are sandalwood and bees’-wax’ (1872:199). Identifying beeswax as the more ‘valuable’ and ‘important’ of these two products, Wallace provides a detailed and vivid description of native men harvesting honey and wax from a wild bee colony in the forests above Dili.3 Sandalwood and wax are also mentioned as two of the products of Timor recorded by Pigafetta in 1522, while one of the first European references to Timorese sandalwood, dating from 1518, identifies ‘sanders-wood, honey, wax, slaves and also a certain amount of silver’ (Dames 1921:195–6) as traded items from the island.4 Some 300 years later, George Grey, summarising the state of trade in the Indian archipelago, reports that the produce of Timor consists of ‘goats, pigs, poultry, maize, paddy [sic], yams, plaintains, fruit, sandal-wood, bees-wax and tortoiseshell’ (Grey 1841: vol. 1, p. 282). 2 Some 150 years later, a similar situation existed in Indonesian-occupied East Timor with respect to the small, but profitable coffee industry. As Dunn reports, the income from this industry ‘became an important source of private gain to a group of senior [Indonesian] military officers’ (1983:337). 3 Gunn (1999:115) reports that in the early nineteenth century, more than 20 000 piculs (a local measure of weight, equivalent to 137 lb, according to Echols and Shadily [1990:428]) of beeswax was exported annually from Portuguese ports in Timor. 4 Other products recorded by Pigafetta are ‘ginger, buffaloes, pigs, goats, fowls, rice, bananas, sugarcane, organs, lemons…almonds, beans and gold’ (cited in Glover 1986:11). 219 Land and Life in Timor-Leste: Ethnographic essays In the twentieth century, Ian Glover makes mention of non-agricultural subsistence practices in East Timor, and discusses how caves are used ‘as temporary camps for parties out hunting in the dry season’ (1986:206). According to Glover (1986:206–7), ‘cave occupation reflected mostly the hunting and collecting aspects of life’, which he believes did not reflect the ‘total Timorese way of life’. In contrast, the Portuguese archaeologist Antonio de Almeida (1957:241) found that hunting and fishing by the inhabitants of East Timor contributed to a ‘great part of their maintenance’. Almeida discusses at length communal hunting of deer, boar and buffaloes, and reports upon the local procurement of shrimps, eels, fish, lobsters, oysters, crabs, turtles

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